1951
Percentage of Bachelor's degrees conferred to women, by major (1970-2012)
Randy Olson charts out the percentage of Bachelor's degrees conferred to women (by major) and makes some startling findings.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,981 posts.
1952
Line length | Butterick’s Practical Typography
Butterick’s Practical Typography
1953
Things That Sometimes Help If You Have Depression
Some of my friends have depression and have asked me for some suggestions. These will be inferior to reading official suggestions, but you will probably not read official suggestions, and you may r…
1954
Performance is a Feature
We’ve always put a heavy emphasis on performance at Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange. Not just because we’re performance wonks (guilty!), but because we think speed is a competitive advantage. There’s plenty of experimental data proving that the slower your website loads and displays, the less people
1955
How to Beat Procrastination
Part 2. Where does a procrastinator go wrong and how can you actually improve your procrastination habits?
1956
Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy
Say hi to Lucy.
1957
A Whole New World
This talk announces the most ambitious software project I've ever undertaken, then considers why its existence is so surprising (and in some cases frustrating) to people.
1958
Average IQ of students by college major and gender ratio
Randy Olson charts out the IQ of students by their major's gender ratio and reveals a startling trend.
1959
The Principle of Least Power
Tim Berners-Lee on the Principle of Least Power: Computer Science spent the last forty years making languages which were as powerful as possible. Nowadays we have to appreciate the reasons for picking not the most powerful solution but the least powerful. The less powerful the language, the more you
1960
Society Is Fixed, Biology Is Mutable
Today during an otherwise terrible lecture on ADHD I realized something important we get sort of backwards. There’s this stereotype that the Left believes that human characteristics are socia…
1961
Quote Origin: A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World While the Truth Is Putting On Its Shoes
Mark Twain? Jonathan Swift? Thomas Francklin? Fisher Ames? Thomas Jefferson? John Randolph? Charles Haddon Spurgeon? Winston Churchill? Terry Pratchett? Anonymous?
1962
We need tool support for keyset pagination
Pagination without OFFSET has many benefits but one problem: there is no tool support. Please help changing this.
1963
Functional options for friendly APIs
What follows is the text of my presentation, Functional options for friendly APIs that I gave at dotGo this year. It has been edited slightly for readability.
1964
Lethal Neutrinos
How close would you have to be to a supernova to get a lethal dose of neutrino radiation?
1965
Taco Bell Programming
The more I write code and design systems, the more I understand that many times, you can achieve the desired functionality simply with clever reconfigurations of the basic Unix tool set. After all, functionality is an asset, but code is a liability . This is the opposite of a trend of nonsense called DevOps, where…
1966
New Programming Jargon
Stack Overflow – like most online communities I’ve studied – naturally trends toward increased strictness over time. It’s primarily a defense mechanism, an immune system of the sort a child develops after first entering school or daycare and being exposed to the wide, wide world of everyday sneezes and coughs
1967
Ra
Magic is real. Discovered in the 1970s, magic is now a bona fide field of engineering. There's magic in heavy industry and magic in your home. It's what's next after electricity. Student mage Laura Ferno has designs on the future: her mother died trying to reach space using m...
1968
1. The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown
TOF once wrote an article entitled "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown and Down 'n Dirty Mud-Wrassle" which described the century-long progress f...
1969
The PHP Singularity
Look at this incredible thing Ian Baker created. Look at it! What you’re seeing is not Photoshopped. This is an actual photo of a real world, honest to God double-clawed hammer. Such a thing exists. Isn’t that amazing? And also, perhaps, a little disturbing? That wondrous hammer
1970
Raycasting
deltaDistX = sqrt(1 + (rayDirY * rayDirY) / (rayDirX * rayDirX)) deltaDistY = sqrt(1 + (rayDirX * rayDirX) / (rayDirY * rayDirY))
1971
Stock Series
If you are wondering whether to dive in, give a couple posts a quick read. You’ll capture the blog’s essence. If after reading those The Stock Series is appealing, you will very likely enjoy it all. If by the same token your reaction is, “This doesn’t feel right for me,” it very likely isn’t. Stock Series…
1972
The Rule of Three
Every programmer ever born thinks whatever idea just popped out of their head into their editor is the most generalized, most flexible, most one-size-fits all solution that has ever been conceived. We think we’ve built software that is a general purpose solution to some set of problems,
1973
The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown: TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown 2. The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown: Down for the Count 3. The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown: The Great Gali...
1974
In Favor of Niceness, Community, and Civilization
[Content warning: Discussion of social justice, discussion of violence, spoilers for Jacqueline Carey books.] [Edit 10/25: This post was inspired by a debate with a friend of a friend on Facebook w…
1975
Why Can’t Programmers... Program?
I was incredulous when I read this observation from Reginald Braithwaite: Like me, the author is having trouble with the fact that 199 out of 200 applicants for every programming job can’t write code at all. I repeat: they can’t write any code whatsoever. The author he’s
1976
DPI Calculator / PPI Calculator
Noteworthy display sizes of monitors, PCs, notebooks, tablets, smartphones, smartwatches and HMDs. Link background color takes into account typical viewing distance:
1977
Object-Relational Mapping is the Vietnam of Computer Science
I had an opportunity to meet Ted Neward at TechEd this year. Ted, among other things, famously coined the phrase “Object-Relational mapping is the Vietnam of our industy” in late 2004. It’s a scary analogy, but an apt one. I’ve seen developers struggle for years with the
1978
Social Justice And Words, Words, Words
[Content note: hostility toward social justice, discussion of various prejudices] “Words! Words! Words! I’m so sick of words! I get words all day through. First from him, now from you. Is tha…
1979
Underlining | Butterick’s Practical Typography
Butterick’s Practical Typography
1980
Churchill's "Democracy is the Worst Form of Government..."
Churchill didn't invent the famous remark, concluding that democracy worked best despite its faults; but he certainly made it famous.